


Hidden Kingdoms

by MotherInLore



Category: El Laberinto del Fauno | Pan's Labyrinth (2006), Strictly Ballroom (1992)
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Crack Crossover, Crack Treated Seriously, Gen, Immigration & Emigration, Politics, Scary Grandmothers, Semi-Reliable Narrator, Spanish Civil War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-27 23:48:44
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,312
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30130776
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MotherInLore/pseuds/MotherInLore
Summary: How Mercedes becomes Ya-ya.Or, of coursePan's Labyrinthis not a prequel toStrictly Ballroom, butif it were...
Relationships: Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Kudos: 1





	Hidden Kingdoms

It takes a few years before Mercedes recognizes that, for her, the war ends in that stone labyrinth, in the garden outside the mansion Captain Vidal had made his headquarters, with the dead girl, and the live baby, and a few bursts of gunfire. Deciding to save Ofelia meant deciding to run, and now there was a dead officer and a missing child, unless the other servants decided it would be safer to claim claim the baby died some other way. Even a spy of Mercedes’ caliber couldn’t stay invisible after that. There is no new job lined up among high-ranking _Falanguistas_ where Mercedes can bone chickens and eavesdrop. All through the next few years of factory jobs for the wrong side of the war (because they're too far from the Front to hide among friends, because she used to work for a Falangist Captain, because she has implied that she was married to a Rightist soldier…), all that time, she has the vague idea that she will rejoin the Loyalists at some point, provide some crucial intelligence or some extra bread. Not until there are Americans in France does she wholly recognize the truth: Everything she can do for the war has been done, and now there is only survival. But the baby in her arms, who becomes the boy at her skirts, is a victory himself. He has to be, because Mercedes paid everything for him.

Not even the true revolutionaries among the Republicans can imagine a world where _men_ raise a baby, so of course Ofelia’s little brother is now Mercedes’ responsibility. She calls the baby José. Mercedes, among her many convictions, holds that St. Joseph gets a raw deal with all the fussing over his wife the Church does. There aren’t so very many men out there, in her experience, who will claim another man’s son as his own, let alone run around from pillar to post hiding from soldiers to protect that same boy. She privately thinks St. Joseph must have been a radical himself, maybe even taught the boy Jesus a thing or two about equality and corrupt governments while he was growing up.

Her brother Pedro takes it hard, when he realizes the war, their war, is over, and that the Republicans lost. That that damned caudillo Franco is going to die in his bed like a grandfather. He doesn’t have his sister’s steel core. _Hombres son duros_ their mother used to whisper to her, _y mujeres son durables._ Men are hard. Men can be weapons or foundation stones. Men can shatter. But women, women are tough. To be a woman in a world of men is to know that even your allies are happy to take your freedom from you, that you can choose which bastard you will bow to, which one you will avoid and ignore, which one you will fight, but there will always be bastards who have power over you. To be a woman in a world of men is to know that you will still have to fight, regardless. Mercedes knows that in a Spain where the Facists have won, there is still a need for translations of Marx and Engles, for press dispatches in both directions to get past the censors, for people who will teach anyone who asks how to read. There will still be a need for people who can make go invisible around great men, but are not afraid to cut them a new smile if the time is right. Mercedes kisses her brother goodbye and wishes him well, but she will not be going anywhere, thank you, and José will grow up knowing how to fight, not on in the woods and hillsides that can be lost, but in the mind, that can only be surrendered. Mercedes has many convictions, but in the end, many of them boil down to _fuck them._ She will stay, because fuck them. 

They survive. The war, the big one, that's keeping everyone else too busy to help the Loyalists, ends. None of Franco's allies can afford to buy anything from Spain, and with that the army men find themselves out of favor, compared to the money men and their pets with their slide rules and glasses. Some things get easier. Mercedes gets married, because if she doesn’t someone will take José from her to be raised by dried-up nuns or some lick-arse Party-faithful bourgeois couple. Mercedes’ husband is a beautiful Andalusian dancer who cannot be seen to like men. They get along alright, most of the time. Tonio brings color and light to their patchwork family, and a sense of play that Mercedes did not previously think she could afford. “It does no good to be afraid, _m’hija,_ ” he says, “to live in fear is only half a life,” which is a slogan Mercedes has heard before, but she never knew anyone before who could just … not be afraid. Not out of defiance, out of anger and determination, but only because he could not be bothered. She tells the other wives in their apartment building, sometimes, that her husband is a fool. But she has her doubts about that.

******

The huge utopian visions that bind the Republicans who were stubborn or crazy enough to stay are a sharp contrast with the little, practical things they can actually accomplish. It gets worse as the economy gets better, as the Technocrats supplant the Soldiers in Franco’s cabinet, as the factory jobs come in. Some people find they cannot fit both food and fire into their bellies at the same time, and they go ahead and surrender that last, secret territory in the mind. Among those who stay steadfast, sometimes the strain between the ideal and the necessary erupts into stupid, trivial fights about things that would not have mattered a hoot during the war: Is it a betrayal of revolutionary ideals to drive a SEAT? Should the wife of a revolutionary (Tonio has never cut open an army captain, only ever attended the underground meetings to get laid, but Mercedes is now the _wife_ of a revolutionary) wear trousers and cut her hair and learn to shoot, to prove that women are free, or should she be more respectable than the starchiest of Catholic _doñas,_ to prove the honor of the Resistance? If the government is embracing Flamenco for their nationalist picture-postcard distortion of Spanish culture, does that mean the Resistance should reject it? Or double down to reclaim the arts for themselves? Mercedes mostly stays out of this kind of thing, but she puts her foot down (so to speak) when they start in on Flamenco. She cuts her eyes over to the doorway she knows José is hiding behind. 

“I have told my boy about his big sister, many times,” she begins. “She got through the war by telling herself that she was a princess. Her sickly mother, the evil man who used them both, all these things were the trials she must undergo to prove herself worthy of her kingdom. Do I wish she dreamed of being a union organizer? A heroine of the working people? Do I wish Certain People whom I will not name, though we all know them. recited modern poets instead of their paternoster in times of trouble? Maybe a little bit. But in a period of reaction, our first duty is survival. When Ofelia lay dying in my arms I called her princess. And I will not shame anyone for taking whatever they need to survive.”

It doesn’t shut the argument down, of course. But José smiles at her over breakfast the next morning, sweet and open and bright, and the next night her husband and son drag her to the tavern where they both like to go dancing and pull her into the whirl of guitars, spinning her back and forth between them, laughing, patting the rhythm into her arms or her bottom until she can feel it too, can move her feet in time and let her heels clack, after so many years of moving like a ghost. Mercedes has worried sometimes about the softness she sees in her menfolk, the certainty that they could not live through what she has lived through without breaking. But then she remembers Ofelia, who stayed soft, kind, and gentle until the end, and died, but never broke, and she decides instead to see this, these joys and moments of ease, as victories too.

******

Tonio leaves them when he is fifty and José is fifteen; too many cigarettes and too many assholes, and all that softness in him suddenly breaking down from carrying him through a world that wants men to be hard. At the wake, there is dancing, and Mercedes does not ask the beautiful men with the straight spines and the grim faces and the feet like hailstones how they knew her husband. He was there when she and José needed him, and she will not shame anyone for taking what they need to survive, even if it kills them.

José clatters into manhood after that, developing a hair trigger temper and a peremptory manner to cover for his lack of age and authority. He quits school and goes to work for the tavern, mostly as a busboy, though they let him dance in the early parts of the evening, when it’s not too busy. (The hours he dances get later, and later, as his dancing gets better and better.) The late hours of the job allow him to provide Mercedes with a self-important and unwanted escort to and from her own job, in a cannery, lets him feel as if he is providing her with the safety Mercedes has not wanted for herself since before José was born. Mercedes continues to meet with the Union organizers, listens to whispers about certain movements within the Church that might not be so palatable to the people in charge. But her son is not so very interested in revolution, until he falls in love with a girl from Barcelona: Candela, an actress who wants to help start a troupe that puts on plays in Catalan. After that then it’s as if he went and wrote the Communist Manifesto all by himself. Mercedes tries not to laugh when he lectures her.

The baby in her arms is a victory. All babies are victories, and both sides of the war that is not spoken of openly in Spain know this. The Church tries so hard to make sure all the children in their parishes have Christian upbringings. The news will not report on the many children who disappear from families who are not Godly enough. So tiny Francisca, with her strange, pale eyes and thin, waving limbs, she is a victory. The right people have been bribed, or fooled, or frightened, or distracted. Mercedes bounces the baby on her knees in rhythm while her parents dance, and she worries. “Things have changed,” her friends reassure her, the ones who drive SEATs and own dogs. “They aren’t cracking down nearly so hard as they did during the war. The rules are much more relaxed now.” But that just means you don’t have warning ahead of time. 

When Candela dies, Mercedes is prepared. She boxes José’s ears when it looks like he’s going to start making too big a fuss at the hospital, maybe start asking angry, grief-stricken questions about whether his beautiful wife really died from a thrown brick in the riot, or if maybe there is a policeman’s bullet lodged somewhere in the body he will not let him see, might start blaming the wrong side of the fight for the violence. “Listen,” she hisses, “go home now. You need to be with Francisca.” Because a baby in one’s arms is a victory, and somewhere in the apartment building is a vicious old _doña_ who has always thought José and Candela were too wild, and now it’s just the boy and the old woman, and wouldn’t it be better if some other family were to take the poor baby in, give her a better chance at life? 

This is the kind of war Mercedes knows, and she knows when to lie and wait and when there is no more time for niceties. Mercedes calls the tavern, speaks a few words in the ear of a comrade. They will have the wake there, and they will plan, and Mercedes will spend a frankly obscene amount of money to call Pedro long-distance with the sad news. She doesn’t say a word about what they will do next, but she knows Pedro, and he will be ready to take in his sister and her son and granddaughter, when they can get out of the country. She has stayed and fought, all her life long, but this is too long a fight, trying to keep Francisca safe in Spain. It would be only half a life, the other half spent looking over her shoulder, counting over contingency plans, scrimping and saving for the extra bribes, going to extra Masses and joining useless women’s clubs, all out of fear. She’s getting too old for this shit. Fuck them. She’s ready to take the victories she has and run with them, all the way to New South Wales.

*******

Australia is as hot and dry as Andalusia; Tonio would have loved it. The people speak an English that does not sound like the English in radio broadcasts. Pedro’s tavern is not called a tavern, but a _milk bar,_ and he does not sell beer or wine, but only soda and milkshakes, because the licensing is cheaper. There is a clean, shiny counter on one side, where fair-haired people with red-brown, sunburned skin can perch on round, vinyl-topped stools and eat hamburgers and sausage rolls and ice lollies and hurry out again. There is a courtyard in the back that is slowly becoming a Moorish garden, where people Pedro likes enough can sit on wooden chairs at tables and eat proper food and stay for hours. He has hopes of the “outdoor seating area” becoming a proper restaurant, an attraction for Anglo-born romantics as well as Spanish expats, but the licensing, again… it’s better to maintain polite fictions about family friends, for the most part.

So Mercedes is a cook again. (She is not, officially, Mercedes here, she is Maria, according to her forged papers, but it doesn’t matter, since everyone calls her “mama,” or “ma’am,” or “hey you.” She likes it better this time around; there are no army men. She is cooking for rough, bouncing teenagers and tired housewives, not sharp-edged captains. Their occasional rudeness won’t stop them from coming back and won’t follow her upstairs and means nothing whatever. This time, she has a toddler staggering around her knees, banging empty Coke cans and singing, “Ya ya ya-ya, Ya-ya-ya-ya yah,” This time, she can eat the ice cream she serves, with no housekeeper complaining. She eats a lot, in memory of loaves of bread that were half sawdust. She’d gotten thicker with middle age, but now, in New South Wales, she grows fat. Another victory. As far as she is concerned, every stone in weight she gains is another blow against Franco. Fuck him. His soft bed didn't keep him alive much past the time Francisca was born, and now he's in Hell where he belongs. Mercedes keeps her knife in her brassiere, now that it’s big enough, instead of at her waist, and she smiles and smiles.

Australia settles something inside José, too. The world of the milk bar is small enough that he can grow into his fatherhood, without feeling overwhelmed. He stayed small and scared when he was a fatherless boy in the fearful stew of Spain under Franco. The brash, easygoing air of Australia brings him alive. His forged passport said he was “Rodrigo,” and the locals call him _el Rico,_ the rich guy, and he does, indeed, look rich. He has Mercedes alter his clothes to show off his slim, broad-shouldered body. He spends ages on his hair. He smiles at the customers even when they’re rude, picks up English fast enough to flirt with the mothers of Francisca’s age-mates. He keeps a sharp eye on his daughter, barks his orders, loses his temper for fifteen minutes or half an hour, forgets it again. He will take over the milk bar when Pedro retires, and he will make it his kingdom, as strange a kingdom as the one Ofelia invented for herself, all that time ago, and as needed. The place where her boy is King and there is no fear is full of bright boxes of strange foods and cans and bottles of fizzing drinks in lurid colors, no gold, no dark, no fairies, but bright lights and guitars. Mercedes took the boy away out of vengeance, out of _fuck them,_ but he's a bigger victory than that, now.

******

And Francisca, their triumph! Their bewildering, half-foreign, prize! Her vowels flatten, Australian fashion, as she leaves the milk bar and attends school. She listens to boring music in 4/4 time. She seems to have two selves, in English and in Spanish. The Spanish one has her papa’s quick temper – throws trays of silverware across the tiled kitchen floor in anger. The English one seems timid, standing a little back with hunched shoulders as she offers an ice cream to moon-faced Natalie, her friend. Francisca could never have grown up this timid and kind and safe, under Franco. Mercedes could wish she would let her claws show a little more often, yearn a little less for the approval of her schoolmates, but the backbone is there, straight and proud above her twinkling feet, when she needs it. In English or in Spanish, sometimes her jaw firms up, her pale eyes blaze, and nothing in Heaven or Earth will move her from her chosen course. The first time it happens, Mercedes has to sit down for a moment. She looks, just for an instant, like Captain Vidal.

Mercedes starts teaching her granddaughter how to use a good knife: how to chop lettuce, how to slice tomatoes, how to bone a chicken, where to keep it so no one will notice, where to stick it when it is time to do damage. Francisca looks uncomfortable, and Mercedes sees her slip the knife out of her pocket and hide it in a flowerpot when she goes to school, but she learns all the same. Even without her knife, Francisca can spit insults back at the blonde, painted queens of the Sixth Form, who whisper down the shining counter of the Milk Bar, just loud enough for Francisca and Natalie to hear. She is so beautiful.

She doesn’t see it. She sees the spots that break out on her face, the bruises from where her arms and legs intersected with the rest of the world at the wrong times and the wrong speeds. She sees the bouncy blonde hair and the bouncy brown breasts of Liz Holt, and magazines full of Princess Di, and she draws endless, stylized pictures of yellow-haired girls with toothy smiles wearing ballgowns with puffed sleeves the size of dirigibles. “I’m so tall, Yaya,” she mourns.

“That is your victory, _mi tesoro,_ ” Mercedes assures her. “ _Tu padre,_ he is short because there was no food when he was growing up. But your grandfather, he was tall.”

“I thought you said you didn’t know who my grandfather was.”

“No, _José_ does not know his father’s name, and I swore he never would. I did know; I killed the man myself.” Pedro is not around at the moment to contradict her, to argue that no, he was the one who shot Captain Vidal. He may have been, but Mercedes is the one who sliced his face open, and she is the one who took his son away.

“He was...” She is bright, little Francisca. She has heard the story of Aunt Ofelia, and she can make some guesses. 

Mercedes strokes her back. “Whatever he was, it does not matter to you. Whatever evil he may have wished to pass on, it is all washed away. Ofelia gave her lifeblood to wash it away.”

The girl shudders under Mercedes’ stroking hand at the mention of blood, lifts her head from her damp pillow to give her the “why are you not like other grandmothers” look. It occurs to Mercedes, belatedly, that Francisca may in fact have some reason to be a little afraid of her Yaya.

She tries to reassure the girl. “You are strong, _mi tesoro,_ and you are brave, braver than your papa, even. Because José _el rico,_ he has his pride that he guards every minute but you, you are brave enough to be humble, to ask for help, to make your bargains. Just keep watching, and asking, and you will find the people who will help you. That is how you live a whole life, Francisquita.”

Soft, round Natalie introduces tall Francisca to a new community of dancers, working people whose hearts are not in their work, but in their leisure time. They spend all their time practicing steps, or sewing spangles onto yards of bright polyester, all their thoughts on the moments when they will transform themselves into creatures more gorgeous than peacocks, more glamorous than movie stars, graceful under the lights of the casino ballrooms, in costumes that sparkle like fireworks. Francisca falls in love. Eventually, she finds a boy there, and falls in love with him, too.

He is very pretty, this boy. Mercedes has more fun that she would ever admit to anyone who was not of her own sex and at least her age, patting at his young, muscled chest in the rhythm of the Paso Doble. And Francisca is alive, sparkling, so beautiful. Mercedes makes sure, though, that her little girl still carries a knife hidden at her waist, long enough to pierce a cheek or a belly, sharp enough to split atoms. “He seems nice, this boy,” she tells starry-eyed Francisca, who has stopped wearing her glasses and moves through the world in a fog of love. “He seems nice. And if it turns out later that he is not nice, _mi tesoro,_ you can gut him like a pig, because you are brave and you are strong, and I have taught you how to use a knife.”

A week later, her treasure limps home from the State Championships, tight-lipped and red-eyed. “Do you want help hiding the body?” Mercedes asks her.

“Don’t bother,” Francisca snaps, in English. “He's gutless already.” Mercedes is so proud of her she could burst.

*****

They call it “dance sport,” have rules and tournaments, but it’s not so very many people, taken altogether. Not so many that the Pan Pacific Grand Prix has a pool of potential winners all that different than the Waratah South District championship; there’s better and worse dancers, but the organizers need the entry fees too much to turn anyone away. So there are divisions and sub-divisions, and Francisca has her dream of dancing at the Pan Pacific, even if it’s in the Beginners’ levels. 

Of course Mercedes and José come along to watch. Mercedes wishes the girl had chosen to wear the scarlet dream of ruffles she’s been sewing for the last three weeks, but Francisca insists it would make her look silly to show up in the Beginners’ contest in such a confection, like she was “getting above herself,” that curiously Fascist sin that egalitarian Australia so likes to accuse people of. Even so, even in her flowered Church dress, she is beautiful. _“Qué bonita,” _she whispers to José as Francisca and Natalie move through a silly, English parody of a tango, to the blare of a silly, French parody of a Spanish military march. _“Qué bonita,”_ and she might have meant the girl’s misty waterfall of black curls, the long, clean lines of her carefully placed feet. But in fact, Mercedes is looking at her straight, immovable spine, the glare of her blue eyes and the jut of her jaw. Francisca, like Ofelia, like José, has found her kingdom and will not be moved from it.__

__Her boy shows up as they are getting ready to leave. There is a scene, and they all miss the Cha-cha arguing, and most of the Salsa while the kids are changing their clothes._ _

__Francisca strides like a queen among the brown-faced dancers who crane their necks to see a woman come out alone among the couples, a woman alone and smiling. She looks so happy, under the lights. Her boy spends nearly half the Paso Doble on his knees before her. Good._ _

__Of course, you can never completely get rid of the bastards in power over you. There is a brawl starting at the judges’ stand. The music stops with a horrible shriek. A red-faced man, _caudillo_ of a tiny, tiny kingdom, orders them off the floor._ _

__They don’t go. Mercedes watches with dawning joy as the hands clap and the feet stomp. Something inside her warms and glows as the self-made royalty on the dance floor makes room for the masses climbing down from the bleachers. It is a tiny, tiny kingdom, this world of dancers Francisca has claimed as her own, but she has, for today, made it into a true Workers’ Paradise._ _

__Mercedes has learned to savor her victories where she finds them. To one side of the stage, a little white-haired puffball of a man, “one of those,” according to rumor, like poor dead Tonio, is watching the dancing that is no longer a contest. Mercedes holds out her hand in invitation. “Don’t be scared,” she says, and he smiles nervously and steers her onto the floor. They are difficult, revolutions, but they are worth it._ _

**Author's Note:**

> Fran's dad is 'Rico' in the cast list, but if that ever gets mentioned in the movie I didn't catch it, so here it's a nickname. Because I Say So.
> 
> I kind of wish I'd been able to work more magic realism into this, if only to justify my working title of 'Pan's Pacific.' But Mercedes was not having any of that, thank you.


End file.
